PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The 33rd International Symposium on Halogenated Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) (DIOXIN2013) will be held on August 25-30, 2013 at the Hotel Inter-Burgo in Daegu, Republic of Korea. The past 30 years have witnessed rapid advances in analytical technologies for the identification, detection and quantitation of these chemicals, increased knowledge about their formation, fate and environmental transport, identification and characterization of new classes of POPs, and significant progress in understanding their biochemical and toxicological mechanisms of action and impacts on human and animal health. As a result, scientific, governmental and public interest in and concern about these chemicals has continued to increase. Current research on these chemicals now encompasses a broad range of scientific disciplines, from analytical and environmental chemistry to molecular biology and human health. The broad and long term goals of this symposium are to bring together the world's experts in these diverse scientific areas of POPs research and to provide them with a unique multidisciplinary forum in which to communicate and discuss recent results and emerging issues, and to develop interdisciplinary collaborations and translational approaches to addressing the problems of POPs contamination. This meeting will provide such an opportunity for the more than 800 participants expected for this four and a half day conference of over 40 oral presentation sessions and three open poster sessions covering a diverse range of topics. Each day will start with a plenary lecture by a leading POPs expert followed by oral presentations in four concurrent sessions on a variety of POPs areas, while the afternoon begins with a poster session attended by all participants, followed by two sequential blocks of four concurrent oral presentation sessions. The final day will conclude with an overall summary session describing significant advances reported during the meeting and discussing future challenges in POPs research. The national and international organizing committees will ensure that there will be significant participation by students, postdocs and young investigators, parity in the numbers presentations by women, minorities and persons with disabilities, and balance in the number of presentations by researchers from a various regions of the world. The significance of the Dioxin symposium is that it provides a very unique opportunity for interdisciplinary communications and interactions among scientists with diverse scientific backgrounds and disciplines yet who have a common interest in POPs and these interactions and collaborations have led to major advancements in understanding of the formation, fate and transport of these ubiquitous contaminants, their environmental impact and adverse health effects.